“Me,” said Moishe, “I’m hoping history will remember how I found beautiful women.” In the past five years, Moishe had learned not only the maps, knots and hornpipes of sailing, but also its swagger.
Then from below deck, “Retreat, fetid piss-dribbler, or ye shall wear your red guts for ribbons in your malodorous hair.” The unmistakeable poetry of Jacome el Rico, tavern-dwelling husbander of books with the zayin-scarred face. He was already claiming territory.
Columbus left the ship to confer with Martín Pinzón, local crew-procurer, captain of the Pinta, and second-in-command of the fleet. Pinzón stood tall on a sack of grain surveying the grand duchy of the Palos docks, a place where he was the tallest tree and could unfurl the top gallant of his pride.
Columbus hove up on the boards beside him, gesticulating in the Italian manner, flying his words like a kite. Pinzón nodded solemnly and watched the preparations of his men all around them.
There were three boats ready to sail.
The Ni?a. The Pinta. The Santa María.
The first two were extracted like teeth from the town of Palos, required by King and Queen in quittance of a fine. The Ni?a, little girl, named after Juan Ni?o, its owner who would sail with us. The Pinta, the painted or spotted one: pinta, a disease that pocks the skin. Think syphilis, bejel or yaws. But more, later, of the fleshy story of these spiralling putz-devils that travel always with sailors.
Santa María, the flagship, the largest, a carrack; the other two, caravels.
But who would sail these three nautical hand-me-downs?
Most of the crew were from Palos or other ports along the Rio Tinto. Several—including Jacome—were, like Columbus, from Genoa. There were conversos, a hidden Jew or two, some Basques, a couple Portuguese, and Fernandez, the painter. Certainly, he would haul sheets and repair rigging, but he would also fill the painted foreground with what had previously only been seen over an imaginary horizon: the peoples, creatures and lands beyond.
Columbus had also engaged the services of a translator: Luis de Torres. Torres was able to speak Hebrew and Aramaic in the event that the lost and found tribes of Israel were teeming on the beaches, awaiting contact from the mother ship, the Santa María, that had travelled half the world on a watery crusade to find them.
When all you have is history, everything looks like diaspora.
Columbus expected to discover these tribes in the Far East and Torres would parley with them in their common and ancient tongue.
A landing party would row up to an island in a skiff and Torres would call out, “So, nu, vos macht ir? How you been these last two thousand years? And breakfast before you left, was it eggs?”
Except, of course, he’d say it in Aramaic.
Sailing with us, in order to ensure that the royal interests were protected, were representatives of the King and Queen.
Or as Moishe termed them, ballast.
And though the Queen had offered pardons to criminals who would commute their sentence from land to sea, would choose the uncertain hornpipe of the waves over the inevitability of the hangman’s reel, there were only four who chose to dance this freedom freylekhs.
Bartolomé de Torres had taken the local magistrate’s life from his body with a knife then left the corpulent remains on the floor while he drank the deceased’s flagons of wine and collapsed, like a brother beside him, thereby entering himself into evidence. A day later, rats gnawed his bleeding ear and returned him to consciousness. He found himself jailed and knew his own shlemiel life would soon be over.
But later that night of little moon, Goday, Pati?o, and Foronda, three of his compadres, removed the prison bars with a rope and a mule, and the four escaped—halevay, it should happen to you—into the ever-loving arms of the jailors, returning from an evening of drink and carnal satisfaction.
These four perfectly illustrated two species of Yiddish fool. Shlemiels pass out and find themselves in hot water. Schlimazels pull their friend from the roiling pot only to get their mortal goose cooked into soup.
These hapless shmucks were now sailors making the world new. Escaping the jail of one world for another, their new digs barred only by palm trees, lagoons, and sweet fruit.
There were ninety crew. Sailors, representatives of Their Jew-horking Highnesses, but no priest.
Why would Columbus, who sang so sweetly, at least to the Queen, of discovering a new world of souls not include a single Holy Father on board?
“Who needs a priest,” Moishe said, “when God chirps by the cave of your ear, huffs your sails, inks your charts, and pulls back the cover of the world as if readying it for your Vice Regal shlof. Besides, God might get to thinking He knows more than His captain. It’s not good to risk mutiny by one who controls the sea.”
“And everything else,” I said.
“Tell that to Martín Pinzón,” Moishe said.
Pinzón and his younger brother, Vicente, who captained the Ni?a, were khans of the Palos shore and most the crew whom they’d procured, considered them so.
“It’s hard to pick your nose with another man’s finger,” I said.